What if you could not only take a university course on zombies, online dating, or Disney fandom — but create it yourself? At UBC, upper-year undergraduates can do exactly that through the Student Directed Seminars (SDS) program. This initiative empowers students to design and lead their own three-credit courses, stepping into the role of both scholar and instructor. More than just niche topics, these seminars are a rare opportunity for students to take ownership of their learning and bring underexplored, often deeply personal interests into an academic space.
Facilitating a course through the SDS program is a rewarding but demanding process. It requires more than just a good idea — it takes academic maturity, leadership and serious time management skills. Students must reflect on their readiness to lead, find a tenured faculty sponsor to mentor them, and secure a separate faculty recommender who can vouch for their facilitation and communication skills. From there, students must develop a detailed course proposal that clearly outlines the academic value of their seminar and how it differs from existing UBC offerings.
What drives students to take on the challenge? For many, it starts with a personal spark — an idea they couldn’t stop thinking about, a gap they noticed in existing coursework or a subject they felt deserved more attention in the classroom.
For Thea Sheridan-Jonah, a political science major with a minor in First Nations and Indigenous studies, the idea to create a course on the politics of drug policy grew out of years of activism and community organizing. As the longtime president of the UBC chapter of Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy (CSSDP), she was already deeply involved in harm reduction and drug-user liberation work on campus.
“There are a variety of groups doing harm reduction work on campus,” she explained, “but there wasn’t really an active coalition together.” That gap led her to co-found the Harm Reduction Coalition, a network that brought together organizations like CSSDP and The FentaNIL Project. It was through this collaboration that she and fellow seminar organizer Kaden Anderson-Hancock realized they had been thinking the same thing: though UBC offered some courses on drug-related topics, there was little direct focus on drug policy within political science.
“There’s an anthropology course about drug policy and about drugs, and there’s been sociology courses about them, and there’s been political science courses about housing and policing,” said Sheridan-Jonah, “but not specifically about drug policy.
“I think [the subject] is a really helpful first step into analyzing policy and analyzing specifically how policy impacts people on a day-to-day basis because harm reduction as a field or practice has so much research behind it specifically based in the lived experience of people who use drugs.”
In an attempt to address this blind spot, Anderson-Hancock and Sheridan-Jonah joined forces to propose a student-directed seminar — one that would bring drug policy into sharper academic focus at UBC.
The opportunity to lead a course can also provide students with a testing ground for future aspirations. Aatisha Avasthi, now an MA student in English literature at UBC, initially became interested in facilitating a seminar as a first step toward a career as a professor. The SDS program gave her the chance to step into that role early on with her seminar on anti-colonial and feminist frameworks in undergraduate study. It allowed her to explore what it might feel like to design a course of her own and gain experience that aligns with her long-term academic goals.
Though the SDS program offers an attractive level of freedom and opportunities for experience, bringing a seminar to life is no easy feat. There is a detailed and thorough proposal process to complete before students can even host their first class.
“The actual first step in the process of the student seminar is to find a supervisor — a faculty sponsor for the course that has some area of knowledge, preferably in [your] topic,” said Anderson-Hancock. For him and Sheridan-Jonah, that sponsor was Dr. Carey Doberstein, an associate professor of political science whose research focuses on governance and policy in reference to the homelessness and drug crises in Canada.
“We had a meeting and constructed what we thought could be filling these gaps [in drug policy education] in the UBC curriculum. The proposal process is quite long. You have to [write a proposal with] a rationale saying why this should be a student seminar at UBC.”
”The [proposal] process itself was a lot,” agreed Avasthi. “There was a huge form that we had to fill out … The questions do require you to be mindful and intentional about [the seminar].”
After going through this rigorous process, in addition to creating the syllabus and conducting countless meetings with sponsors, the seminar can finally begin in earnest. Unlike traditional lecture-based classes led by professors, student-directed seminars tend to be smaller, more collaborative and discussion-driven. The minimum enrolment for each seminar is seven student participants (including the facilitator) and the maximum is fifteen, making these classes significantly more intimate than the average lecture hall.
Anna Mondragon, who facilitated the existential psychology seminar, Search for Meaning: Logotherapy as a Therapeutic Approach, noticed a clear difference from traditional lectures. The students in her seminar trended towards an “active way of learning, as opposed to passive learning,” the latter of which can be the norm for classes with a large number of enrolled students.
“[In traditional lectures], you just show up, you just sit there and you don't get that much engagement or time for discussions,” Mondragon said. “Since our class was less of a formal class, and it was also way smaller, we got a lot of time to discuss topics that we were really interested in.”
Anderson-Hancock agreed, saying the structure of student-directed seminars tends to be more collaborative. “There isn’t a lecture done by Thea or myself or anyone; instead, there are group presentations on topics that serve as a substitute for a traditional lecture.”
As opposed to a traditional course, where students are accountable to their professors via grading, Sheridan-Jonah said that, in a student-directed seminar, participants are accountable “to the other people in the course, and therefore their learning [is] dependent on the learning of all of the rest of the folks in the class.”
Sheridan-Jonah’s facilitation style embodies this spirit of collaborative learning.
“In the first third of the course, [students] each did presentations on current news articles, relating them to topics or the theme of the day. But they all got to bring in some sort of context that was relevant to them.” She believes this approach encourages students to “engage in [ideas] that [they’re] already passionate about while relating them to the course.”
Autonomy extends into the grading process as well. Instead of depending entirely on a professor to assess all coursework, evaluation is shared between faculty and peers depending on the type of assignment.
Sheridan-Jonah explained that individual assignments — like papers and reports — were graded by the seminar sponsor while more collaborative or public-facing work — like group presentations — was assessed through peer review.
”We’d send those peer review marks to Dr. Doberstein,” said Sheridan-Jonah. “He’d say if they were in sync with other POLI 300-level courses. If they were, we’d leave those marks … and then we’d go from there.” This hybrid grading approach reflects the program’s emphasis on student agency, accountability and shared responsibility within the classroom.
It’s important to note that in student-directed seminars, the student facilitator isn’t acting as a professor.
”Although [Sheridan-Jonah] and I are the course facilitators, we're not professors; we're not teaching assistants, but we are facilitating the discussion that we're having in this course,” said Anderson-Hancock.
So, what exactly does the facilitator’s role look like in a student-directed seminar?
Mondragon explained that she “was still doing all the things that a teacher would, like Canvas announcements, emails, finding material, doing the PowerPoint presentations for every class, talking with students, dealing with their issues.”
Yet despite taking on many of the behind-the-scenes responsibilities of a traditional instructor, she was still fully part of the learning community: “The role was dual — at the same time, I was a student myself, so I was doing the assignments myself, and all the group works that I came up with.”
While student-directed seminars offer a unique and empowering academic experience, they don’t come without challenges; even after making it through the daunting proposal process, facilitators often juggle a demanding workload that includes course planning, administrative tasks and managing group dynamics, all while being students themselves.
For Sheridan-Jonah, one of the more complex challenges lay in navigating the boundaries of her role. She and Anderson-Hancock were facilitators, she explained, but they felt they were in some ways operating between the role of a professor and a TA. This in-between position made certain situations — like handling absences or accommodations — especially tricky: “We didn't really have the authority to say what was OK in the course or what wasn't.”
For Mondragon, the challenge was more personal — stepping into an unfamiliar role with little precedent to follow.
“It was a lot of work trying to figure out how to be a facilitator and a student at the same time,” she explained, underscoring the dual expectations placed on facilitators to lead effectively while keeping up with the academic demands of the course themselves.
“I think having a co-facilitator made it so much more smooth,” said Anderson-Hancock. He and Sheridan-Jonah “outlined right away what roles [they] would play on each day.” This helped them balance responsibilities like leading discussions and managing technical aspects such as running the screen.
To help prepare facilitators for the demands of running a course, the SDS program provides training and support in advance.
“One of the people from the SDS department, [provided] half of the training,” said Mondragon. “They also invited some external resources, some external people to go over ethical topics or any issues that we might run into.”
The training sessions included hands-on components like role-playing and opportunities to ask technical questions in a supportive environment.
“I felt like the resources they were providing were good enough for me to feel prepared,” Mondragon continued. “[There was] nothing that I couldn't get an answer for, nothing that I couldn't get help for.”
Dr. Sunaina Assanand, a professor of teaching in the department of psychology at UBC who has been sponsoring and supporting student-directed seminars for many years, emphasized that the support system for student facilitators continues well beyond the initial training phase.
“I'm available to the student [facilitator] to address any concerns that may arise,” she said. “For instance, conflict or disagreement among students, difficulties with participation or creating classroom etiquette guidelines, challenges that might arise in terms of the reading list or learning assessments.”
Alongside the pedagogical and interpersonal challenges that can arise within individual seminars, Sheridan-Jonah said that money sometimes became an issue.
“Like most university initiatives,” she said, “I think more funding is always needed.”
In particular, Sheridan-Jonah felt that a larger budget would have allowed for more guest speakers to be brought in beyond the two they were able to host. Increased funding, she believes, would enhance the learning experience by providing students with greater access to diverse perspectives and expert insights.
Despite the challenges that can come with organizing and facilitating a course, student-directed seminars are a valuable option for students pursuing their education in focused or specific fields.
“[The] seminar was just an amazing experience in the sense that I could talk about a topic that wasn't being offered by UBC and other classes,” said Mondragon.
Sheridan-Jonah echoed this, highlighting both the personal and communal impact of the SDS program. “I would say it's an incredible opportunity,” she said. “As students and as young people, we often have perspectives and experiences that might not be represented in the courses that professors are offering ... it's not just important for your own leadership development, but also for other students to be able to engage in courses that might be more relevant to them or relevant to the current context.”
Assanand said the skills that students gain from participating in student-directed seminars extend far beyond the classroom.
“[Students] gain tremendously in terms of prototypical leadership skills such as communication skills, metacognition related to the student-directed seminar context, teamwork, capacity to listen simultaneously. They [also] hone skills to educate. Certainly, while they are peer-learning among other students within the seminar, they are creating to a significant degree the learning context.
“As such, they are able to envision themselves as an educator, and it is a vital experience in terms of the trajectory to create a meaningful learning context for others.”
First online
Share this article
